Right Thinking from the Left Coast

BOOM! The Marxist In Chief Just Played The Osama bin Laden Card!

The question was about appeasing Islamic countries politically. You know, countries populated by the Good Muslims, the overwhelming majority of Muslims who adhere strictly to the peaceful part of the Religion of Peace. So didn’t Obama just equate them all with terrorists? With the adherents of the pedophiliac, barbaric, behead-at-the-drop-of-a-turban wing of Islam? Tsk tsk Obama. At least we have some transparency from that cretin’s administration now though. They know full well that Islamic countries are a terrorist threat to us and our allies, and they appease them anyway. Not in spite of their threat, but because of it. Obama can’t wait for the destruction of this country. It’s his #1 goal.

Comments are closed.

Not quite. It was about the Republicans accusing him of appeasement in foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Obviously Obamas point in his response is that actively killing terrorist leaders is hardly consistent with appeasement.

I don’t understand how he has equated the entire population of the Middle East, including Israel, with Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders. Can you explain that a little further?

At least we have some transparency from that cretin’s administration now though. They know full well that Islamic countries are a terrorist threat to us and our allies, and they appease them anyway.

By using the example he did Obama is clearly disagreeing with the assessment that he’s following a policy of appeasement. He’s not agreeing. So how does that make anything ‘transparent’?

One has to wonder what the accusations about appeasement would be if he hadn’t taken out Bin Laden and been responsible for policy decisions which took out the others. What would those accusations look like?

Many Republicans flatter Gingrich by treating him as one of the party’s intellectuals, but Gingrich frequently shows that he is unable or unwilling to make crucial distinctions in his treatment of international problems. He complains on his campaign website that “we currently view Iraq, Afghanistan, and the many other danger spots of the globe as if they are isolated, independent situations,” and that America “lacks a unified grand strategy for defeating radical Islamism.” But these conflicts are largely separate from one another, and there is no such thing as a monolithic, global, radical Islamism that can be addressed by one strategy. No conflicts around the world can be properly understood except by focusing on local circumstances, but for Gingrich, the ideological emphasis on a unified global threat takes priority over proper analysis.

Which makes him the perfect antithesis of conservatism. Conservatism is concerned with reality, which it understands shifts with culture, history, region and all the immense complexities of human life. When a conservative approaches a problem like Jihadist violent Islam, he will seek first a grasp of its divisions, analyze the most effective way of defusing and disarming and fighting it, ensure that a strategy in one part of the world is not necessarily salient to another, grapple with unintended consequences, and so on. What Gingrich does is the opposite. What he always longs for is the absolute, eternal principle, the clarifying concept, the rhetorical rallying cry that speaks to the ideological gut rather than the reality-based frontal cortex. And Gingrich’s notion of foreign policy – making John Bolton his secretary of state – is essentially a policy of open hostility to the entire world, including allies who differ, and a maximalist military solution to most problems.

Part of me wonders if Gingrich couldn’t heighten the absurd contradictions of contemporary “conservatism” and help accelerate its destruction. But the damage he could do as president vastly outweighs the uncertain benefits of that particular scenario.

Aside from the unarguable, absurd, and embarrassingly vapid implication by you that I, or most conservatives for that matter, support Gingrich, what does that have to do with the OP? Nothing? Cleanup on aisle 5 please! POOF!

I didn’t even remotely infer that you supported Gingrich as the Republican candidate, or as POTUS. Your mindless binary approach to everything Islam does seem to be consistent with his though. I thought that piece summarised it pretty well (the piece from which the larger quote is taken expands further).

BTW apparently my second post (to which you’re responding in your usual knee-jerk fashion) is “awaiting moderation”, so those that don’t have your super-blog-powers won’t be able to follow this until it actually appears.

In addition to the questions in my first post, can you also please explain the relevance of Marxism to this issue? Did Marx advocate appeasement when dealing with the Middle East?
Also, how did taking out OBL and other high ranking terrorists show us that “Obama can’t wait for the destruction of this country. It’s his #1 goal.”? Surely that would have been counter-productive?

I don’t agree with Obama with on most everything, but he did nail bin Laden, and if he wants to use that from time to time so be it. Bush had 7+ years to get him and didn’t do shit except prove candidate Kerry’s argument that we couldn’t handle Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. Bush fucked up royally on the bin Laden hunt in my opinion. The only person who was a threat to bin Laden under Bush was Father Time, and hoping he’d cash in from illness. Bush fucked up, Obama didn’t wait around and agree with how he did it or not, or if he had any hesitation or not, at the end of the day he did get rid of bin Laden, so he gets bulk of the credit in my opinion.

I don’t think Obama has been any more of an appeaser than any other president when it comes to countries with oil.

Now, I do think he made a mistake bringing up OBL as when asked about his foreign policy, he mentioned killing one bad (very f*cking bad I might add) terrorist. Killing OBL does not foreign policy make. And, OBL doesn’t represent all Islamic countries. For Obama to equate that one action to his foreign policy abilities is a mistake.

If a republican would have said this, the media would have howled about how the president is calling all Islamic countries terrorists by calling out OBL as an example of his foreign policy. We all know that would happen here in the US.

I completely agree that it wasn’t a very good answer to the substance in the question. However I think the reason he chose to respond in that way had more to do with the Republican part of the question. They (the Republican primary candidates) are in election mode, and are starting to directly challenge him (as we would expect). He’s in election mode, and is starting to push back. All answers are going to, at least to some extent, be about differentiating yourself from your (primary or election) opponents.
I would expect any President, of either stripe, to bring up those particular successes when given the chance, when in this mode. Why wouldn’t they?
I would assume most reasonable people, whether they agreed with it or not, would realise that killing high-level terrorist leaders isn’t the sum total of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

I would hope that I would have more than just killing OBL as examples of non-appeasement. And, I would hope that I would bring them up, after highlighting successful terrorists kills.

I think the prez (in my humble opinion) could have said, “We took out OBL. Not only did we kill him, we took him out within a compound within a mile of the Pakistani West Point. None of the republicans were willing to go that far – we were. We also have continued the fight on the WoT in various countries, supported the change in Egypt, sanctions on Iran etc.”

He could’ve rambled off many things he has done – some even more strong than Bush (ie Pakistan). Again, the repubs can’t really claim they aren’t appeasers too. He could have really painted them into a corner, and missed the opportunity by only focusing on OBL.

I would hope that I would have more than just killing OBL as examples of non-appeasement. And, I would hope that I would bring them up, after highlighting successful terrorists kills.

I agree. Possibly it didn’t help that he had a second, entirely unrelated, question to answer.
The first question could potentially take half an hour to answer properly. We live in sound-bite times, and elections are all about sound-bites, not substance.

You’re also right that he could have talked about the different approaches taken to the different components of the Middle East. In one of my comments I quoted some discussion about the importance of dealing with the different Middle East components on their own terms. Go hard in some areas, tread softly in others. As approriate. By and large I think that’s what he’s done. That’s what your alternative response expresses. I think anyone paying attention (to everything, not just what they choose to include) can see that. Others appear to want to ignore all that and conclude (from a one-sentence response to a two-part question involving accusations by opponents) that the President is now transparent in his desire for the destruction of the US.